Degree in Devastation

James Villanueva and his father reclined on their lawn chairs, taking in the view from the front porch of their Echo Park home. They chatted idly over the newspaper spread out over Antonio Villanueva’s lap. Muted traffic noise from nearby Alvarado Street could barely be heard above the sounds of life in the four homes behind them, where they lived with 10 other family members. For nearly three decades, this modest property near Dodger Stadium had been home for various members of the immigrant family.

Two men showed up that day bearing news that would shake up the lives of the Villanuevas and dozens of others in their neighborhood. They were officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District, and they had come to talk money. On the spot, they offered Antonio Villanueva $700,000 for his property. Other folks on the block heard similar offers. This was to be the site of L.A.’s newest elementary school.

Word of a new school had filled the rumor mill along these hilly streets for months. The latest rumblings that Antonio Villaneuva had heard suggested the campus would be built a few blocks down, near Clinton Street. Talk filtering out of community meetings said nothing about it moving to their block, or that it might gobble up the property that the Villanuevas shared with their 10 cousins. But now James and his father wondered if they had missed a crucial update. After all, the school district officials had scheduled the two-hour meetings at the inconvenient time of 4 p.m., when James, his brother Jesus, and his father were all at work.

On this day nearly four years ago, Antonio chose not to believe that these men posed any threat to him and his family. Leaning over to his son, Antonio said, “They’re stupid. Let’s just wait and see what happens.”

A year later, the family was served an eminent domain notice that they would be evicted from the house in which they had lived for 26 years. They ended up moving around the block, and have now joined other Echo Park community members engaged in a legal battle entering its third year over the massive swath of 49 mostly modest stucco homes that the school district has swallowed up in this once tight-knit neighborhood.

Declining elementary school enrollment and fierce local opposition raise questions not only about the district’s tactics in the name of its aggressive building program, but whether the upheaval in the neighborhood was even necessary. It’s hard to imagine that voters – if they could have known about the ruin it would mean for dozens of families here – would have generously approved three bond measures, totaling nearly $10 billion.

The seized homes have now stood empty for two years, falling into disrepair and acting as a magnet for homeless vagrants and drug users. In an attempt to keep out unwanted visitors, the windows and doors of every home have been shuttered, but ineffectively so. Holes in the wood and glass show where intruders have breached the flimsy defenses in search of copper wire and other building materials, or just a place to sleep.

The area is cordoned off by a chain-link fence covered in black plastic, that taggers have covered in spray paint, giving it the flavor of a third world city. The area is full of the ghosts of happier times, when extended families lived together and worked to build the neighborhood into a safe and vibrant place for their children and grandchildren. Today, there is only desolation, with the neighborhood serving as a battlefield on which L.A. Unified is fighting residents who are insisting that might does not equal right.

The battle’s already claimed serious casualties. Many of the older ex-residents, some struggling with diabetes and other illnesses, could not physically or financially persist in the defense against the school district’s onslaught. Many families abandoned ship early in the conflict, leaving carefully maintained homes to be overrun with weeds and rot, shingles falling and drainage pipes hanging askew.

The former residents have scattered, some relocating to Riverside, where experts hired by the school district assured them they could find comparable housing to that which was taken from them. Some abandoned the area altogether. Relocation checks, required by eminent domain law in California, were sent as far as Ecuador. One woman recently saw her former place of employment – the Ambassador Hotel – devoured by the school district, and now lost her home, too.

“Now we’re looking at an area that’s blighted, empty,” says Mitch O’Farrell, district director of constituent services for City Councilmember Eric Garcetti’s office. “It’s a disgrace.”

One of the project’s early backers, former school board member for District 5, David Tokofsky, thinks so, too. “One thing you can feel free to ream the school district on is the condition of the site today.”

The Numbers Game

In 2004, Tokofsky helped usher in this plan for the contested site, known as site 9A. Armed with new bond money and overcrowded school conditions, Tokofsky and the other board members began the push to build a school in Echo Park.

The goal, he says, was to relieve two overcrowded elementary schools in the area, Rosemont and Union. Voters had passed three bonds by this point, Measure BB, Measure K, and Measure R – worth $9.6 billion. A fourth, Measure Y, would be passed in 2005. To the school district, it totaled a voter-given mandate to continue construction.

“The mayor lost his housing bond, but if you ask people in this town if we should be building schools, they said yes four times,” Tokofsky says.

Maybe, replied the Echo Park community, but only if that school is needed. Opponents of the new school organized themselves into the Right Site Coalition, headed up by Elysian Heights resident Christine Peters and represented by attorney Robert Silverstein. Together with the Echo Park Historical Society and several of the displaced former residents, they went to court to challenge the project.

The coalition recently won an appeal to stop the bulldozing of the abandoned homes and businesses, while the second of two lawsuits continues in court. The project, expected to start in 2005, has been delayed now for more than two years.

“We have argued for the last three or four years that this school project is not needed. And despite the propaganda from LAUSD, we know from LAUSD’s own internal demographic studies that the school age student population is plummeting,” says Silverstein.

The decrease of elementary school-aged students is at the heart of the coalition’s argument. All of the local elementary schools are losing students at a rapid rate, to the point that the principal of Rosemont Elementary was campaigning to solicit new students to fill empty desks and classrooms for the last school year.

According to L.A. Unified, Rosemont lost 487 students between the 2002-2003 and 2006-2007 school years. Union Elementary, another facility that the Echo Park school is meant to relieve, lost more than 738 students. Two more schools close by, Elysian Heights and Clifford Elementary have only 268 and 174 students, respectively. Of Elysian Heights’s 25 classrooms, only nine are in use.

But neither of these underused schools are appropriate relocation choices in the eyes of the school district.

“The idea is to build a neighborhood, not to increase public transportation use or school buses,” Tokofsky says.

If you want a neighborhood school, Tokofsky says, you must put one in the Echo Park neighborhood.

And, although the demographics look as though they’re decreasing now, the problem of overcrowded schools that was so endemic in Los Angeles has not gone away, it’s just not as bad as it was, Tokofsky says. Just because enrollment isn’t as high doesn’t mean it’s low enough.

“It’s like saying less people are being born in Calcutta,” he says. “[Enrollment changes have] decreased from a Rosemont of 1,700 to 1,000. That’s not a happy, bucolic nirvana.”

The school planned for site 9A is meant to relieve five elementary schools in the area: Commonwealth Elementary, Union Elementary, Rosemont Elementary, Lafayette Primary Center and Lake Street Primary Center. Of these five schools, three are on what the district calls a 4-track calendar, meaning that school is in session year-round, but teaching different kids. The district expects elementary enrollment to increase again in the near future, and if that is the case, Rosemont and Lake Street would also be forced back onto a 4-track school year.

The problem with 4-track is simple, Tokofsky says. Kids don’t learn.

A 4-track elementary school system means that the school year is 163 days long versus the usual 180. The lost 17 days are made up by lengthening the school days. The problems spring from the fact that school stops every 10 weeks to allow new students to come in. The schools only have enough books for one set of students at a time, so those students who’ve already had 17 fewer days to retain the information can’t reinforce it at home: They have to turn their books in every 10 weeks.

When the kids come back, they aren’t coming back to the same classrooms, which limits the teachers’ abilities to make a safe, consistent learning environment.

“If you were trying to teach children that everything in life is transitory, that’s a good thing to do. We don’t need to be Bedouins,” Tokofsky says.

Christine Peters spearheaded the Right Site Coalition, and while she agrees that a 4-track school system won’t do anybody any favors, she says that the rhetoric the school district is putting forth concerning “neighborhood” schools contradicts the school-relief plan the district has laid out.

“Union and Commonwealth are in Koreatown. It’s not anywhere near Echo Park,” she says. “There is no way to justify other than through LAUSD logic, how those schools are going to benefit by building a school in Echo Park.”

For that matter, if 1,000-person schools are so abhorrent, why is the Echo Park facility being envisioned to hold over 800 students?

“That’s the thing, the whole jargon of LAUSD. They argue that they want small neighborhood schools for our children,” Peters says. “If you don’t want children going to a 900-seat school, why are you building one in Echo Park?”

Taking on L.A. Unified

The lines that delineate the boundaries of site 9A hew the neighborhood in half. Occupied houses share fences with homes that have been abandoned now for years. From her place on Santa Ynez Street, Gloria Delgado can easily see the shuttered windows. She’s lived there since the 1960s, like many of the residents who were forced out.

“I’m just so glad they didn’t take my home,” she says. “I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

Others, like Ana Baragan, weren’t so lucky. She and her family moved into the neighborhood in the late ’80s when it faced another set o f urban ills. She would find broken syringes in the alley behind her house, left by the gangs that prowled there in the night.

She and her neighbors took action. They petitioned and got signatures to close down the alleyway, and organized a neighborhood watch to keep the area safe. “We bought the house thinking it was the house we were going live in for all our lives,” she says.

So the Baragans joined the 15 other families to fight the encroaching school district. They had all heard similar pitches from the district’s men offering them money. And it wasn’t only financial advice they shared.

Recalls James Villanueva: “They said, ‘[Your neighbors are] not going to get far because you can’t win against the state. Whoever’s doing that is just going to take your money, you’re better off just settling.’” They were told that their wages would be garnished and that they might get less for their property if they fought the takeover. Many residents caved under the pressure.

They just didn’t see it coming, Peters says. “They were never part of the notification because they were never in the search area. We community volunteers had to go door-to-door and tell people they had just been selected as this preferred site and they had never been involved in the community process.”

Residents of site 9A felt cut out of the decision-making process, says Mitch O’Farrell, district director of constituent services for Councilmember Eric Garcetti’s office.

“This exact site was decided upon at a fifth public meeting and it was presented for the first time as an option at that meeting. It was a hybrid location as part of a previously considered location along with additional blocks,” O’Farrell says. “The people who actually lived at the selected location were not part of the meeting because they felt that the option had already been disqualified.”

By the time the community was informed, what became known dispassionately as site 9A had already been given the dubious honor of “preferred site” status, Peters says. Their only hope was to rally the community and go to one of the school district meetings and speak out against what they considered an unnecessary seizure of their homes.

Unfortunately for them, the speakers’ roster had already been filled by proponents of the school. Not one dissenting voice was heard at the meeting.

“The day of the school board meeting, we started getting calls from people saying we don’t get to speak publicly,” O’Farrell says. “The district organized the speakers that day for the hearing and they were all in favor.”

The school began to appear to be a juggernaut that the community couldn’t stop; they could only get out of the way.

“People got scared,” Jesus Villanueva said. “The tactics they were using, you can’t say they’re illegal, but they were bad business practices.”

As the school board prepared to approve the request for eminent domain, the community was kept in the dark. All notices sent to the primarily Spanish and Tagalog-speaking neighborhood were in English. The documents were posted in other languages at the local library. Meetings were held during or immediately after many residents got off from work, so attendance was poor.

Even when they could get to the meetings, the Villanuevas say, their complaints went unheard.

“They have to go through the motions so they can say they’re letting us speak. But they’re not hearing us,” James Villanueva says. “Even when you can show up, they don’t make it easy. We were told that they weren’t there to answer our questions, just to let us say how we feel.”

Even that wasn’t easy much of the time. James showed up promptly for what was supposed to be a school board meeting, only to find that it had been postponed for Superintendent Ray Romer’s retirement party. He was asked to come back later that evening.

In the face of opposition, the school district points out that even people in Echo Park voted for Measure K, the bond that is funding this project. James Villanueva certainly did.

“I voted for them to get more money, but I didn’t think it was going to be like that. You would think it’s for education, but it doesn’t actually work out that way,” James says. “It was supposed to go for the kids to get better equipment and Internet and stuff, and they’re not going to get it.”

The move wasn’t easy on anyone. To stay in the area and make payments on the second mortgage they had to take out on their single house, the Villanueva sons had to take second jobs. James works as a graphic designer full-time and a carpenter on the weekends, and Jesse repairs cars on the side after he finishes his work as a diesel mechanic. The third brother, Gasper, is an accountant. Their father, Antonio, was on the verge of retirement before the costs associated with the house forced him to return part-time as a jeweler.

“We are all busy, and hardly have anytime right now for ourselves and family,” James writes in an e-mail.

Ana moved into her new home in Sylmar two years ago when the school district forced her out of her place in site 9A. The Baragans were among the last families to leave after a long fight that ended with an eviction notice. Despite the time that’s passed, she is still feeling the loss of her life in Echo Park.

“I looked through the window of my new home and I felt like crying,” she says.

Dreams of Moving Home Again

Looking back on that first meeting of 15 families at La Fonda, a restaurant that would also be demolished in less than a year, Jesus Villanueva remembers how terrified they felt. Fighting L.A. Unified in court would take money and time, which could be used to rebuild their lives elsewhere.

“We don’t even know how things work, but we weren’t easily scared, and that was our thing,” he said. “They can’t do this.”

The Right Site Coalition’s first lawsuit against the school district was not filed to challenge the eminent domain – that is an impossible suit. Instead, their lawyer, Robert Silverstein, decided that he would insist that the district follow the letter of the law on the construction, whatever that may mean in terms of delays for the opening.

The first point of contention was the California Environmental Quality Act. By California law, all major construction projects are required to go through the Environmental Impact Report process, an intensive look at the effects of the project on the environment, economy, and resident quality of life. The school district had not prepared an EIR for the site, so Silverstein sued to force them to do so in 2005.

That round lasted through December 2006 when the court decided in favor of the Right Site Coalition, stripping the school district of its rights to build until they filed an environmental report. The second lawsuit was filed in reaction to that EIR.

“That report was so shoddy and done with such bad faith that we sued again,” Silverstein said. That suit began in July 2007 and is yet to be resolved.

However, as this second lawsuit began to wind its way through the courts, the school district decided to take action on the site that it now legally owned. In July 2007, bulldozers began knocking down the two commercial properties, La Fonda Restaurant and a tire store.

It was the Villanuevas who first saw the bulldozers and ran to call Peters and Silverstein. By then, the two commercial properties were gone and the bulldozers had turned toward the houses.

Silverstein immediately sought an emergency injunction to force L.A. Unified to wait out the contested EIR lawsuit before knocking down any more homes. The first court refused, but last month, an appellate court handed down the emergency order Silverstein had been looking for.

“The Court of Appeals stepped in, agreed with us, and stopped the demolition. It came down with the decision that the trial judge had made a mistake, and the homes are protected for now,” Silverstein says.

Tom Calhoun, L.A. Unified’s development manager for the central region, sees the lawsuits as unnecessary and ultimately fruitless delays. “We own the land, we’re going to build the school,” he says.

One of the main points of contention over the EIR is that the school district is a self-certifying agency that has the power to approve its own decisions. The EIR that was prepared for the school district was approved by the school board.

As the district waits for the lawsuits to end, the clock ticks closer to 2010, the projected opening of the school. The clock is also ticking on the school district’s budget.

Already, with the rising costs of construction materials, the district has been forced to cut funds to 18 other schools it plans to build in other areas. To finish all the schools as planned, the district would need another $1.2 to $1.8 billion, Calhoun says.

It doesn’t help that the Echo Park School acts as a constant drain on the district’s cash pool. “We’re suffering damages to the tune of $110,000 a week because it’s been languishing in this state for about a year,” Calhoun says.

Even if the Right Site Coalition wins in court, there is no guarantee that the families could get their properties back, even if they wanted to. The homes appear mostly unsound after standing empty for over two years.

“It would be an amazing thing if we could get the school district to admit that times have changed and the need has changed and that this isn’t the time to be building a school there. We would have to acknowledge that because of their intentional neglect of the properties, a lot of them will not be salvageable at this point,” Peters says.

The Villanueva family now lives around the block and, as much as Antonio Villanueva dreams about it, moving home again isn’t likely. After all of the court cases and time and money spent on winning against the district, they were never actually fighting to win back the rights to their property.

Unless, of course, they wage yet another fight and prove wrong the school district lawyer who paid them a visit a year or so ago. “We asked him if we could buy our property back if they don’t build a school there. He said no,” James says. “My dad was fighting to stay.”